Another to whom I put the same question, answered me in a sympathetic letter full of understanding comment.  The mingled devotion, energy, and blindness of the women the letter described, spoke in its every line.  They built charming homes, reared healthy, active children whom they educated at any personal sacrifice—­all within a circle of eighty saloons!  To offset the saloons they built churches—­a church for each sect—­each more gorgeous than its neighbor.  It was in building churches that they showed the “greatest tenacity of purpose.”  They had a large temperance organization.  It supported a rest room and met fortnightly to pray “ardently and sincerely.”  How little this body of good women sensed their problem, how little they were fitted to deal with it, my informant’s comment reveals.  “You doubtless remember the story,” the letter runs, “of the old lady who deplored the shooting of craps because, though she didn’t know what they were, ’life was probably as dear to them as to anybody.’”

“It was just as it is everywhere.”  Busy with self and their immediate circles, they went their daily ways unseeing, though these ways were hedged with a corruption whose rank and horrible offshoots at every step clutched the feet of the children for whom they were responsible.

Perhaps there is nothing to-day needed in this country more than driving into the minds of women this personal obligation to do what may be called intensive gardening in youth.  Whether a woman wishes to see it or not, she is the center of a whirl of life.  The health, the happiness, and the future of those that are in this whirl are affected vitally by what she is and does.  To know all of the elements which are circulating about her as a man knows, if he does his work, the political and business elements in his own group, this is her essential task.  That she should adjust her discoveries to the organizations, political, educational, and religious, which are about her, goes without saying, but these organizations are not the heart of her matter.  The heart of her matter lies in what she does for those who come into immediate contact with her.

Her business firmly established in her immediate group should grow as a man’s business does in the outer circle where he naturally operates.  It will become stable or unstable exactly as trade or profession becomes stable or unstable.  Every year it should take on new elements, ramify, turn up new obligations, knit itself more firmly into the life of the community.  With every year it should become necessarily more complicated, broader in interests, more demanding on her intellectual and spiritual qualities.  Each one of the original members of her group gathers others about himself.  In the nature of the case she will become one of the strongest influences in these new groups.  As a member goes out she will project herself into other communities or perhaps other lands, into all sorts of industries, professions, and arts.  Her growth is absolutely natural.  It is, too, one of the most economical growths the world knows.  Nothing is lost in it.  She spreads literally like the banyan tree.